This Friday: Spring Art Walk on Wisconsin Avenue

The annual Spring Art Walk has become a seasonal fixture in Georgetown, right in step with the buzzing, foliate bloom of our gardens. As the Book Hill galleries on Wisconsin Avenue open their doors for a night of open houses — filled with paintings and sculptures, music, wine and conversation — the event, from 6 to 8 p.m. on Friday, May 13, becomes a local inauguration of the cultural reawakening that warm weather brings.

Addison/Ripley Fine Art

1670 Wisconsin Ave. NW
“Dan Treado: You Are Getting Sleepy”

The playful merging of science and art, the genuine delight in tools and methods and the shared interest in performance art and experimental music are at the center of Dan Treado’s recent work. He often employs tools of his own design to create luminous, richly surfaced paintings on Baltic birch panels. Treado’s paintings are process works that borrow from film and photography, physics and biology textbooks and electron microscope images.

Susan Calloway Fine Arts

1643 Wisconsin Ave. NW
“Katie Pumphrey: Heavyweight”

In August of last year, Baltimore-based painter Katie Pumphrey swam the English Channel in 14 hours and 19 minutes. For Pumphrey, athletic competition and painting are part and parcel of a single journey. Her works offer insight into our obsession with sports and athletic events, and our war-like and ceremonial glorification of star athletes. They also uncover a harmony in the hulking motion of wildlife and large animals, in rushing herds of buffalo and massive schools of fish, shedding light on our own traditions of highly social and herd-like competition.

In partnership with the Cultural Service of the Embassy of France, Cross MacKenzie Gallery is hosting an exhibition of paintings by the Cuban-born French national Rafael Torres Correa, who creates lyrical universes in his large abstract canvases. His paintings evoke memories — symbolic and emotional—and conjure imagined experiences of water and floating islands with their shifting imagery and fluid execution, using washes, drips, dabs and splashes of paint. These landscapes are transitory territories and shifting metaphors, a state that parallels the artist’s own migrations and cultural identity.

This show of groundbreaking glasswork features the collaborative works of John Littleton and Kate Vogel. Littleton and Vogel met at the University of Wisconsin in the 1970s. Since 1979 they have lived in the mountains of North Carolina, where they began their collaboration on blown and cast glass in the studio of John’s father, Harvey Littleton. Their recent work includes a marvelous, gem-like series of desert flowers and succulents made of cast and hot-worked glass, which in the deft hands of these masters defies the perceived limitations of the medium.

On view through May 28, “Transitions” showcases the intaglio prints of Gabriel Jules alongside gorgeous artist books of the Salisbury Book Guild and the Academy Art Museum in Easton, Maryland. Jules engages with the intimacy and rhythm of the etching process. Her work, largely representational, explores our ties with the surrounding world. The showcase of artists’ books is uniquely wonderful, presenting viewers with many surprises as they finger through the pages; they are among the few works of art you are allowed to touch (with gloves, of course).

Book Hill Pop-Up Gallery
1666 33rd St. NW
“High Art | Low Art: Works by David Richardson and Ari Post”

David Richardson is a man who has long led two rather contradictory careers, as both a Marine Lt. Col. through multiple tours of combat duty, and as a contemporary painter. Ari Post, who studied painting and illustration, now works for the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries (and writes for The Georgetowner). In this show are recent paintings by both artists, along with other artistic ventures not usually exhibited in galleries. Post has created multiple series of political caricatures, cartoons and ink-work more typical of the Sunday funny pages than a gallery wall — a love letter to newspaper comics and political cartoons. Meanwhile, Richardson, who normally deals with the subject of war through his art using allusion and abstraction, has come out with a series of far more brazen, blunt and politically charged works, influenced by and akin to war propaganda, but infused with a fascinating, mysterious ambiguity and unmistakable painterly bravura.

Glass artist and designer David Patchen uses the Italian techniques of cane and murrine in an American style. Known primarily for a combination of complexity and scale in densely patterned glasses, his organic forms reveal something unexpected and precious. Patchen describes the optical properties of glass as intriguing, as the glass offers a refractive palette with the ability to bend, layer and twist color and light, modulating both density and translucency unlike any other medium.